So while I was disappointed that in the age of COVID-19 I would be able to meet Wilkerson only via Zoom, I suspected that it was her ideal setting, one that she could control. This is Wilkerson’s first on-the-record conversation about Caste. Until announcing her new book, her social-media presence consisted largely of sharing others’ work. After booming onto the literary scene with The Warmth of Other Suns, she disappeared from publishing for more than a decade, quietly researching but telling virtually no one the details of her new project. social hierarchy as a caste system: a deeply entrenched yet artificial method of categorizing people by birth. Instead of relying on concepts like racism-which Wilkerson sees as too narrow-she argues for understanding the U.S. But this time, Wilkerson offers a transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America. Like her earlier work, Caste blends history, sociology and a range of other reportage to tell the story of American inequality. Wilkerson, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and author of the best-selling 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns, builds on her previous success in her new book, Caste, which will be published Aug. “The quiet mundanity of that terror has never left me,” she writes, “the scars outliving the cut.”

Her experience at the airport becomes both prosaic and outrageous, both personal and a universal condemnation of the society we’ve built.

But in Wilkerson’s skillful hands, the scene is imbued with a deeper meaning. “These things are so much a regular feature of life for people of color in this country and African Americans in particular,” she says in an interview over Zoom. In some ways, the story, from Wilkerson’s highly anticipated book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, will sound unexceptional to many people of color-just one of the myriad experiences of injustice that must be swept aside in order for us to get by in our everyday lives.

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson